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News You Can’t Use

I’ve been reading Joe Muto’s excellent (And funny!) An Atheist in the Foxhole, which is subtitled, “A liberal’s eight-year odyssey inside the heart of the right-wing media.” One of the things I learned is that Fox News was not always the way it is now. Of course, they were always going after the right wing hate radio listeners. But at first, their focus was on “news you can use!” By this he means that they had more segments on consumer issues and religion which have since gone away. Why would they need them? They can use the commercials for consumer information. And Christ is the one true way and anyone who doesn’t believe that (along with being anti-choice and anti-fag) is an agent of Satan.

I was thinking about this last night. The Fox News coverage of Obamacare has explicitly been: news you can’t use. The biggest story out this last week has been that insurance companies are using their ended policies to mislead customers into buying much more expensive policies. This is the kind of stuff that conservatives normally get outraged about. They have this childish notion that capitalism would work fine if it weren’t for those occasional bad apples. That’s right: most conservatives do not understand how capitalism is supposed to work, much less how it actually does work.

Now Fox News wouldn’t say anything about these practices regardless. It’s only the conservative voter who believes such fairy tales. The elites know what conservatism is all about: keeping the weak down and funneling as much money to the powerful as possible. But in this case, Fox News has an even higher calling: destroying Obamacare. So it is with great relish that they are reporting insurance company malfeasance as a problem with Obamacare.

So Fox News is purposefully keeping their viewers in the dark about news that actually affects them in order to push their ideological agenda. For most Fox News viewers it won’t matter because they are already on Medicare. But the behavior is still disgusting. For a small partisan advantage, the network is more than willing to cost each of its “young” viewers thousands of dollars per year.

I remember a poster in my high school library that read, “Ignorance is NOT bliss!” Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is for sure: ignorance is expensive. And anyone who chooses to feed his angry id rather than filling his empty cortex is getting a very bad deal. And so are we. Remember: such people vote!

Afterword

It is election day in many parts of the nation. If it is election day where you are, please vote! And remember the next general election is 4 November 2014. It’s important!

About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.